Fight The Drug Problem With Tolerance, Not Hysteria

The tragedy of Len Bias, dead of cocaine at an early age on the first steps of the glory trail, has brought out some of the worst features of the current American drug scene.

Everyone from the Rev. Jesse Jackson to Lefty Driesell, the young basketball star's coach at Maryland, is calling for an intensified war on drugs, for more of the same hysteria that helped set the stage for this tragedy and many others.

There is cause for concern about the use of drugs and alcohol by so many of our people, young and old. We must remember, however, that this nation has faced many grave crises and that we weathered them all, primarily through the application of calm horse sense.

Whenever we as a nation acted hysterically, as when we locked up more than 100,000 loyal Japanese during World War II, we soon came to regret it. Let's back up a bit and put the horror of Len Bias' death in perspective.

Perhaps 15 million Americans, including Len Bias, used cocaine during the past 12 months, of whom roughly 700 died. While death from a single use may have occurred, such dramatic collapses appear to be extremely rare, caused either by an allergic reaction or by taking a huge quantity. As with all drugs and medicines, of course, there is always the risk of a terrible repercussion from cocaine.

That drug is a highly refined stimulant that causes the whole system, including the heart, to speed up. Both free base and crack are even more potent forms of cocaine because they are more concentrated and are smoked. Smoking a drug, as Len Bias apparently did, is the quickest way to send its message to the brain, even more rapid than injection.

Cocaine in all of its forms is highly addicting. Yet most people who use it do not become dependent. Of those who do get addicted -- perhaps 10 to 20 percent of the users -- many are able to kick the habit either on their own or with professional help, sometimes after years of personal agony.

The story of cocaine, like that regarding other mind-altering experiences, is full of conflicts in terms of facts and emotions. When in the wake of the Bias death doctors warned that one dose can kill, almost 15 million live users and their friends probably felt that they were being lied to again by the drug experts. Yet, in some ways, the experts were right -- and so were the survivors among the users. Telling the whole truth about any drug is not a simple, straightforward matter.

This factual and emotional mishmash may help to explain the phenomenon of the modern cocaine epidemic persisting and rising in the face of the most intensive anti-drug campaign in history led by the Reagan administration. Indeed, it would be difficult to imagine how this drug war and its attendant anti-drug warnings could become much more intense without destroying the guts of basic American traditions and freedoms.

Columnist James Kilpatrick, however, has called for the execution of drug dealers. Such thoughts are not merely the rantings of one conservative commentator outraged by the drug deaths of young athletes. They have been widely held for years throughout the Congress and executive branch. White House drug policy chief Carlton Turner and communications director Pat Buchanan, among others, have openly called for stringing up those who sell drugs.

While many Americans may slap their knees and whoop that this is the way to treat heroin dealers, they should pause to consider two points. First, however much we may despise the sellers of such substances as cocaine and heroin, in all cases the sale is made to a willing buyer. Drug dealing is not on the same moral plane as treason, murder or even rape, where the victims are quite unwilling.

Second, all of this state-directed barbarity has not prevented a raging epidemic of drug abuse in Malaysia, which recently executed two Australians for trafficking in heroin.

DRUG TESTS FOR ALL KIDS?

In the midst of the current hysteria we also have heard from the parents' movement, which has long advocated a get-tough attitude regarding youth drug abuse, defined as even a single use of any illegal drug, including marijuana. An official of the Virginia chapter of the National Federation of Parents for Drug-Free Youth, in reaction to the Bias case, again proposed mandatory testing of all schoolchildren before allowing them to attend school each year. ''Those who test positive for drugs would be quarantined from the clean kids and provided with intensive education/rehabilitation in separate facilities until they can test clean again,'' the official explained.